Population-Resource Issues

A survey in the Netherlands asked people three questions: 1) Are there too many people in the world?           Yes, they replied. 2) Are their too many people in your country?      Yes, they replied. 3) Are their too many people in your community? No, they replied. We could add: 4) Do you represent part of the overpopulation problem? The answer would probably be -- No, certainly not. The lesson: "too many" people is inevitably too many other people! This hardly is a convincing argument that overpopulation per se is a problem. 1) Examine a PowerPoint file   of David Harvey's Population-Resource analysis. 2) Examine two aspects of the world's population: eating habits and energy use (see below) and income distributions. Eating Habits: check-out What the World Eats? -- food consumption of 30 families in 21 countries World food production has risen dramatically over the last 40 years. There is more than enough food produced to feed each person on the planet, yet millions of poor people go hungry while millions of others eat too much of the wrong food. For example, the world produces twice as much grain as it it did in 1960, on only a third more land -- enough to provide 2,700 calories a day for every person on the planet. Yet 800 million people are still chronically malnourished. [Source for the graph: The New Internationalist, November 2000] · 80% of all malnourished children in the developing world in the early 1990s lived in countries with food surpluses. · The World Health Organization estimates that roughly half the global population suffers from poor nutrition -- of that half 50% eat too little and 50% eat too much. · Obesity is the second-biggest killer of Americans after nicotine, claiming at least 250,000 lives a year. A third of obese U.S. adults are at risk of heart disease and diabetes and a fifth of U.S. children are overweight or obese, a figure which has more than doubled in the last 20 years. · Liposuction (an operation to reduce fat) is the leading form of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. with over 400,000 operations performed a year while a third of all the vegetables consumed by U.S. kids are in the form of French fries and potato chips. Resources: The richest 20 percent of the world's people get about 80 percent of the world's resource production.  Their per capita consumption is 15-20 times that of the poorest half of the world's people. The amount of energy consumed daily by one USA person is equivalent to that used by 3 Germans, 6 Mexicans, 14 Chinese, 38 Indians, and 168 Bangladeshi. One U.S. child generates as much carbon dioxide (i.e. carbon footprint) as 106 Haitian kids. With this new information, "where is overpopulation a problem"? By the time a child in a middle-class family reaches 18 years old, it will have consumed $33,330 worth of food. For this and other reasons, the average U.S. family consists now of only 2.1 children and the percentage of childless women and couples is rising rapidly.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 14 December 2000; last revised on 19 October 2010.